It threatened to pull him back. Tony was beseeching. An amputee.
“You’ve gone…” Mark whispered, “…fucking crackers.”
Tony produced his white gloves with a magician’s flourish. He put them on and, with a curiously tender gesture, caressed his own invisible face. “Have I? Quite honestly, Mark, I don’t know where I’ve gone.”
And Tony gave a low, regretful, yet thoroughly sane chuckle.
“What’s happened to you?”
“Don’t know.” The shirt shrugged. “It’s good to see you, Mark.”
“What did you want? Why did you lie?”
“About being in prison?”
“Yes. All of it. Why take Sally like that?”
“It’s good to see you, Mark. You look so good, I could eat you. You always did that for me. I loved you, Mark.”
Mark went to sit on the bed, by his opened, upturned bag.
“Oh, I know,” Tony went on. “This isn’t the time or place to go into all that now. I thought it was. I didn’t see at first. But now I’ve had you all here and I’ve seen how you go on, see how you work as a family.” Tony’s voice was tinged with scorn when he said that word. “I see how things are. How complicated. Should I really thrust in my love, my old, decayed, long-lost love, to further complicate matters? If I loved you truly, I’d quietly step aside and give you an easier ride. I’d be discreet and kind and let you forgive me.”
“Tony—”
“Hang on, Mark. What I’m saying is that I made it seem, in my own mind, all too simple. I just had to storm back into your life, make you notice me. Such as I am. I thought I was enough for you to love. But when now I look back to all that stuff in the past, I see that you never really loved me. I’d forgotten. I could see then more clearly than you could. You tried so hard, but you couldn’t. And I never stopped wishing that one day you’d wake up and realise that you could. That you could commit yourself to my protection.
“But Sam is the one that protects you, Mark. You know that. I, on the other hand, scare the shit out of you.
“We created each other. But you can’t love me because you know that we can destroy each other, too. You’re like a dam, brinked before the burst. All I need do is pick away one motif in your overall design—pluck away that clock on your heart—and you’d fall to bits. I oversaw the construction of your bricolage, Mark. I was the proud father watching the tattooist’s needle work as she brought you to death. I’m too implicated in your birth—as any parent is—to bring you up safely.
“But Sam can take you all at once, can’t she? She has veneered that tender skin of yours and kept all the pictures together. You’re a whole man at last. I see that now, and it’s all down to her. There’s no chink in that armour for me to find.”
Mark was shaking his head.
“In my early on, transparent reasonings, I thought it was a simple matter of sexual politics. How dare she take my man? But it’s not an issue of your bisexuality, or your selling out. It’s me. I just wasn’t right for you, was I? Sam is, and maybe Richard is, too. Perhaps you can engineer a way to have both? You deserve that. I can say this because I do love you and want to see you get what you deserve.”
The empty figure bent to kiss him. Mark felt the swift brush of Tony’s cheek.
“I’m fucking noble, aren’t I?” Tony laughed. “And you thought I was insane and demonic!”
“But what about you, Tone? They’re taking everything out of the house, you know—”
“I’m clearing out. It’s all my idea. I’ve got the money now to chuck all this crap away. Disperse the fragments of this shitty life and start up again somewhere. It’s quite exciting, I suppose. I want to prune away the loose baggage, the extra elements, and transform what can be transformed into something more useful. Without all the belongings, I’m literally nothing. I had to put on your clothes in order to talk to you just now. Just think, I can put something else on and allow myself to be anything I want. Oh, you needn’t worry about me, Mark. I’ll crop up somewhere, unexpected. As something unexpected. It’s in my nature.”
“You were never going to hurt Sally, were you?”
Tony sighed. “No. Actually, in the end, I went through with it all because I thought you might like to meet Richard.”
Mark looked shocked. Tony went on.
“That was a lie. But it makes me sound clever, doesn’t it?”
Mark stood up, unsure. “Tony, would you let me…?”
“What?”
Mark went through his bag and produced the make-up set given him by the ladies. “I want to see how you are now. I just want to. Whatever you think, Tone, I did love you when we were sixteen. We made each other. And it may be dangerous and impossible to carry that on. I don’t know. I don’t believe in rules, in essential truths. We might have made it. But life got in the way. Circumstances stepped in and they changed us all. We can’t regress…can’t take it back to how it was, start again. That’s why I want to see your face now. If we’re moving on, I can’t go on thinking of you as you were when we were younger.”
Tony sat on the antique chair, white hands harmlessly on his knees. Clumsily, inexpertly, Mark set to work with the make-up. Tony came up, gaudy in purples, blues, pinks. His cheekbones were too sharp and his eyes slightly startled.
AND TONY SAT BEWILDERED AS MARK MADE HIM UP. AS HE ALWAYS
had, he sat passive and
